The latest issue of Psychoanalytic Dialogues is a rich and wide-ranging one, moving from the phenomenology of the clinical encounter to the fractured socio-political world in which analysts and patients alike are trying to hold themselves together. Several pieces are available to read free of charge, and they make for compelling reading.

The issue’s centrepiece is Daniel Butler’s Say Anything: Noise, Tenderness, and the Rift Between the Saying and the Said (free access). Butler reflects on those fraught clinical moments when saying something, even anything, seems to matter more than what is actually said. Drawing on Michel de M’Uzan, Alphonso Lingis, and clinical vignettes from his own practice, he explores how the tender voice can sound out of place that  can disturb both analyst and patient into a life-affirming, if unsettling, depersonalisation. It is a genuinely original piece of clinical writing, and the three discussions that follow it are equally worth your time.

Jack Foehl’s response Feel Everything (free access) extends Butler’s thinking through phenomenology and Merleau-Ponty’s late ontology, arguing that the most significant analytic moments are not relational exchanges or technical interventions but ontological events. Andrew Asibong’s delightfully titled Objet Petit la di da, or the Jouissance of Verbal Ineptitude (free access) takes a more playful angle, reflecting on what it might mean to oscillate freely between articulacy and inarticulacy in the consulting room, and finding unexpected resources in the speech patterns of Diane Keaton. Patricia Ticineto Clough (free access) rounds out the discussions by extending Butler’s thinking on noise and individuation into contemporary philosophical territory around biology, technology, and the post-biological body. Butler’s reply, Touching, Saying, Being: A Cairn of Colorful Stones, (free access) gathers these responses together and elaborates further on the phenomenology of ‘saying’, its relationship to touching, to gentleness, and to what it means to have more say in one’s life.

This issue also features Field Notes, introduced by editors Stephen Hartman and Lauren Levine in a freely available editorial. The series takes its name seriously: field here carries all its psychoanalytic meanings at once, the scholarly discipline, the intersubjective clinical space, the social and political surround. The editors are frank about the context of this series: a world of rising authoritarianism, racial and gender violence, climate catastrophe, and fracturing institutions. Field Notes, they write, is committed to exploring all of it.

The series opens with two substantial essays, both free to read. Joyce Slochower’s Can the Center Hold? Responding to Our Socio-Political Surround (open access) confronts the current political moment head-on; the breakdown of democratic norms, the fracturing of communal life, the weight of existential losses that sit outside the arena of the personal. How do analysts grieve what is being lost without being crushed by it? It is a timely and important piece. Stephen Seligman’s Irreverence and Humor in Theory and Practice (open access) offers a lighter but equally sharp counterpoint, skewering the tendency toward over-idealisation in psychoanalytic culture, the rigid hierarchies, the insider dynamics, the fashionable concepts deployed in ways that obscure more than they illuminate.

Also in This Issue

The issue’s second article cluster centres on Charles Dithrich’s Beta Communication and Osmosis, which extends Bionian thinking on unrepresented experience into new territory, with responses from Caron Harrang and James Ogilvie exploring the limits and possibilities of communication beyond symbolisation. Dithrich then replies to both discussants, drawing the threads together and elaborating further on the concept of beta communication and its clinical implications. Yaakov Roitman closes the issue with a re-reading of Winnicott that explores what it means to awaken from a state of radical self-erasure, what he calls the “no one from nowhere” condition.

The open access articles can be read in full, here.